Alzheimer’s treatment appears to alleviate memory loss in small trial

Larger studies are under way to test whether the promising early data holds up. – By Erika Check Hayden

A drug called aducanumab might remove the toxic proteins thought to trigger Alzheimer’s disease from the brain, suggests findings from a small clinical trial.

The results, reported on 31 August in Nature1, showed that aducanumab broke up amyloid-β proteins in patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. The trial mainly tested the safety of the drug in people, and so the final word on whether aducanumab works to ameliorate the memory and cognitive losses associated with Alzheimer’s will have to wait until the completion of two larger phase III trials. They are now in progress, and planned to run until at least 2020. Read more here.